Thursday, 2 September 2010

The Palestinians are divided between the Fatah government in the West Bank and Hamas, which holds sway in Gaza. The Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, already weakened by the expiry of his democratic mandate, will be negotiating over territory tha...

On the invasion of Iraq, Mr Blair makes his assertion that he does not regret the removal of Saddam Hussein. On the terrorism threat, Mr Blair denies that our foreign policy plays any part in stoking extremism. He mounts the traditional populist defe...

Too 'cool' to look happy
Yesterday morning, walking down the main street of Frinton, I happened to look in the window of a national clothing retail chain. In the window was a large poster advertising children's wear, featuring full-length photogr...

Of course those who have raised questions about Mr Hague's behaviour insist his sexuality is not what concerns them. They are questioning, they say, his judgement about how others would perceive his decisions to share a bedroom with his aide on the e...

In April 2006, the newspaper's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, was able to quote verbatim a voicemail from Prince William to his younger brother, Prince Harry, teasing him about a visit to a strip club.
This was one of a sequence of chillingly ac...

Those of us who like to watch our television shows in the same year that they were first broadcast have the pirates and illegal-downloaders to thank. The BBC has hastened to show this series of Mad Men, partly because it believes that it has lost vie...

A new green prosperity
Your leading article of 31 August rightly points to the urgent need for greater political will to be injected into the forthcoming climate negotiations. Generating new commitment would be made much easier if the economic an...

So M. Sarkozy – whose ministers met European Union officials this week to defend their actions – can claim that he is merely upholding the law. And, technically, there are other justifications he can summon for his initiative, which has seen more tha...

When George Orwell wrote the essay Politics and the English Language, his motivation wasn't pedantry but concern for the relation between lazy writing, lazy thinking and the decline of a culture. "It is clear that the decline of a language must ultim...

Maybe it's because she has won the Oscar which he has always been denied. Or perhaps there is a clue in the film which she is in Britain to promote. Certified Copy is about the communication between a man and a woman in which, Mme Binoche has said, "...

This is not, of course, a subject on which people are open to persuasion. The words "you know what, that vuvuzela sound is actually rather growing on me" have never been recorded.
But, all the same, might a complete ban not have been somewhat hasty? ...

Blair was remarkably relaxed about the unprecedented power he allowed Brown to wield as Chancellor. "I did so," he says, "without any fear of being eclipsed or outmanoeuvred." Yet those around him were not so sanguine and, of course, at the end of th...

Education Secretary Michael Gove had said there were hundreds of schools queuing up to seek academy status. In the end, a paltry 32 have been give the go ahead for the start of the new academic year. The confusion comes as a result of the number of "...